Well not quite haha Growing up I desperately wanted a guitar but my mom wouldn’t even entertain the possibility. God knows I would have accepted a piece of junk in the shape of a guitar but she wasn’t having it. When I moved to Sweden at 19 to be with my now husband (who was at that point someone I had only spent 2 weeks of real life time with and very little time with otherwise) we decided to buy a guitar. Neither one of us have any musical talents to speak of but Sam had plenty of musical friends. Somewhere along the line a friend taught him to play this song, he couldn’t remember how to play the whole song so he just taught me the opening and I played the opening completely delighted with myself lol When we moved to the states we couldn’t take the guitar =( Now I did have music class in the 6th grade and we did learn songs on the keyboard that I no longer recall. I remember that I could not read music very well and when the teacher would sit down the sheet music I would stand at my keyboard dumbstruck. I would ask her to play the piece for me and then just memorize what she had done and play it back to her shortly after before I forgot lol She would also play with me and let me accompany because to accompany I didn’t need to read music I just knew what to do based on her vibes. Now you might think that demonstrates I have some musical talent, I really don’t I promise you (my hearing is much worse now anyways so I can’t distinguish sounds as well) but there are certain people I can mimic/tune in with and she just happened to be one of them. To mimic you have to really open yourself, trust, lose the ego and the opinions and just observe (no analyzing just pure observation). As I get older trust issues block and judgements/preferences creep up so it is only people very close that I can sometimes mimic as a kid the range was much wider. It really comes down to the fact that all people are connected you know?
My music tastes are pretty eclectic so I like music from a wide variety of genres. Being from the South country music is very popular but I have never particularly enjoyed it. The exception is Dolly Parton (I know she is very country) but her singing just breaks my heart. I want to be clear I do not like the Miley Cyrus’ version of this song it lacks emotional depth and maturity. No offense to her but this song is so beautiful because of the emotion Dolly’s tremulous voice conveys.
In high school my mom got tickets for a concert, mixed artists, and one of the bands performing was The Verve Pipe. I was stoked, it was my first concert and one of my favorite bands was performing. Couldn’t be better right? Why yes it could! My mom decided I should go with my dad, my dad is a psychopath/paranoid Schizophrenic/alcoholic he does not like people. He can’t even stay in a room with his siblings and they love him despite all he’s done (my dad is also the man who drove from NC to Florida to take me to Disney World for my 7th birthday at my mom’s request only to drive us home after an hour there). I got him to the concert, he was freaking out in a major way I could tell. I thought if I could just hear this one song we could leave. It was insanely hot, 100 degrees. We were outside, packed in with a hundred sweaty bodies and me with my dad who doesn’t bathe, which means he really does smell like decaying meat (imagine that for a minute in the heat). Then it starts to rain, I mean pour we were soaked. It’s refreshing in a way but shortly after the rain it gets sunny again. I have very fair skin, very fair skin when wet it doesn’t burn it cooks. My legs were tomato red/blistering, it felt like the bones had broken underneath my muscles. Still no Verve Pipe and my dad can’t take it people are drinking and he can’t drink and well there are people. He starts to completely freak out so I obviously we’ve got no choice but to go home. We get to the car and it won’t start I mean really won’t start, my dad will not ask for help from anyone at the concert he has to get away from the crowd he can’t stand it anymore. He steers and I push the car for miles (with these seriously burnt legs, in a 100 degree weather sick as as a dog) before he will concede to ask for help! Have you seen my dad? Well NO ONE in their right mind would ever stop to help him, he looks utterly deranged, wild-eyed and violent. Even the cops won’t stop! So my dad hides and I flag down a car for help I feel pretty bad about it when the poor man catches sight of my dad but he is reassured by me and thankfully won’t leave me in that situation so the guy helps us with the car and we manage, barely to get home. My dad gets drunk immediately. So that was my first concert. The next time my mom got concert tickets to Aerosmith she actually took me herself I actually saw that concert!
I chose this for my guilty pleasure song because it is a song I can listen to over and over again. My husband hates Damien Rice so I listen to it with headphones in secret so he doesn’t make fun of me lol
Although I myself am not Catholic or even of a Western religious persuasion I find the music of Hildegard Von Bingen immensely soothing (so much so that I sometimes listen to it while I meditate). I took Latin in school though I recognize only a handful of the actual words. I was very close to my maternal grandmother, she had a big part in raising me, and she was Catholic (her father was a Monsignor William J. McConnell http://www.strosebelmar.com/srb/Parish/About%20Us/Our%20History/). This reminds me of her, of her unconditional love and acceptance of me.
There is something about this song that takes my mind off things and makes me smile. While I am sure there are some lovely inspiring Pollyanna songs out there that might pick me up when I am feeling down something about fast-paced energetic songs tend to work quite well to help me get out of my head. I tend to over think and sometimes what I need isn’t to think happy thoughts, it is to stop thinking and just be alive in the moment! So unlike my usual choices these songs have very little to do with lyrics and a lot more to do with energy.
I am going to be a little deviant here on my own challenge even lol I was a reasonably well-behaved teenager I had good grades I didn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, party, date, sneak out, commit crimes, get into fights or really anything. My parents didn’t even have a problem with the music I listened too or the clothes I wore. My mom didn’t even care that I wasn’t the same religion as the rest of the family or that I was a vegetarian when no one in my Southern family even understand the precise meaning of “vegetarian”. This doesn’t mean I got on with my mom flawlessly we are both stubborn and we definitely got on each other’s nerves but rarely about anything typical. I wasn’t typical at all I was weird and withdrawn. My rebellion took place mostly in my journals and my poetry. When I was reading poetry by Arthur Rimbaud I felt rebellious, free, primitive, alive an so on this challenge I decided to post a song and a poem by the great Arthur Rimbaud. The song is arbitrary to tell you the truth, though Iggy Pop is a rebel. My mom did not disapprove of my reading choices either, hell my mom didn’t care if I was watching porn on television (I know because she rented me Body of Evidence as I had liked Madonna as a child why she thought I would like her in an X-rated movie with S&M I will never know lol). My mom isn’t very strict which I think is fairly obvious but I also wasn’t untrustworthy.
“As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:
Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets
Nailing them naked to coloured stakes.
I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with
The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.
Into the ferocious tide-rips
Last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,
I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas
Never endured more triumphant clamourings
The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
For ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights!
Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,
The green water penetrated my pinewood hull
And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,
Carrying away both rudder and anchor.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;
Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!
I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts
And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,
And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw!
I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors.
Lighting up long violet coagulations,
Like the performers in very-antique dramas
Waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds!
I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows
The kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of undreamed-of saps,
And the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus!
I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells
Battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows,
Never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans!
I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas
Where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas’ horizon, to glaucous herds!
I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
Where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm
And distances cataracting down into abysses!
Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where the giant snakes devoured by vermin
Fall from the twisted trees with black odours!
I should have liked to show to children those dolphins
Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.
– Foam of flowers rocked my driftings
And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.
Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings
Lifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward me
And I hung there like a kneeling woman…
Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls
And droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,
And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage
Drowned men sank backwards into sleep!
But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,
Hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,
I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water,
neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up;
Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,
I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky
Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious,
Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot,
Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,
A crazy plank, with black sea-horses for escort,
When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows
Skies of ultramarine into burning funnels;
I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues’ distance
The groans of Behemoth’s rutting, and of the dense Maelstroms
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities
I long for Europe with it’s aged old parapets!
I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor:
– Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? –
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.
I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,
Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,
Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.”
While I am not generally big of duets this one is a match made in heaven. I love both artists so maybe I started out with a bias but I have seen a lot of duets go awry even among talented performers but this, this totally works!
=
I have another one Björk and Thom Yorke, Thom way to go on nailing duets!
I know I just posted two David Usher songs but this man is a phenomenal lyricist. While I like the lyrics of countless others artists part of the charm is in how the lyrics are performed with David I actually read his lyrics as I would a book of poetry. l I would love to write this beautifully
St Lawrence River
Smells on the air
See there it’s crushing the final impression
The stains on the paper
Where words fell like water
Unearth all the changes that never did matter
I think it’s beginning to freeze here
Caught in the rage and the fire of things
All the brightness that burns me
I’m fumbling through like a child in the dark
When the nakedness comes
I am shocked by the colour the glorious weight of your skin
Comes alive
And I never thought we’d make it back so soon
Might be nice
But I knew you’d be your own destroyer
Comes a time
And I always thought I’d make it up to you
Here please forgive me
Could we escape all the bitterness piled upon bitterness
Held in the face of the things that I don’t understand
Intellectualize over and over
This helplessness suits us
Funny how quiet has slipped to our corners
Worn all our edges away
You are watching breathing and baiting
Wanting and warming and cautiously waiting
For some simple signal to creep cross your conscience
Uncover redemption and oh did I mention
I carried you down to the St. Lawrence River
The banks running dirty the water’s beginning to freeze here
Solid by morning
And I’ll freeze here
Winter by morning
Comes a lie
And I never thought you’d get me back so soon
Might be nice
But it’s only if my own destroyer
Comes alive
And I always knew I’d make it up to you
I saw on your face such a curious grin
As I let go your hand
I was desperate to hold you again
But you’re sinking so deep in the water
Outsmarted myself and so easily gave up what I wanted
Solid by morning
What I wanted
Winter by morning
Comes alive
And I never thought you’d make it up so soon
Night be nice
But I always knew you’re my destroyer
Comes a time
And I always thought I’d make it up to you
Solid by morning
And I’ll freeze here
Winter by morning
This is the challenge I accidentally skipped so I decided to backtrack and grab it before I get even more off than I already am. I seem to be incapable of following lists lol As I mentioned in the previous challenge my favorite song, is a moment to moment, mood to mood sort of phenomenon so I could never pinpoint any one song. When I was in high school I would read Rolling Stones and Spin magazines and look at the biographies and that was one source of finding good artists pulling them from the interviews because if the interview interested me usually the artist didn’t disappoint. I also would go into the music store and buy CDs I’d never heard of and just did all sorts of random things to find artists as I wasn’t really into boy bands or catchy pop tunes which are/were so popular on the radio. I didn’t have internet till 1999. In the 90s Much Music was pretty fucking awesome and I found a lot of good bands, it might also explain why a lot of the bands I listen to are Canadian even though I am not lol. As I was a teen in 90s a lot of my favorite music comes from that decade. Being a 90s kid I naturally liked grunge and still do actually. I used to practice singing to Portishead a lot, I just love her voice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckom3gf57Yw
mindlovemisery 